Sarah Palin book Going Rogue attacks John McCain campaign

In her book Going Rogue, Sarah Palin reveals tensions with John McCain’s
campaign in their doomed bid for the White House.

By Tom Leonard in New York

6:18PM GMT 13 Nov 2009

In her memoir published next week, the former Governor of Alaska and vice-presidential candidate reveals simmering tensions over last year’s Republican campaign.

Sarah Palin's book 'Going Rogue'

She seeks to portray herself as a homespun, patriotic and God-fearing mother whose image was distorted by a domineering McCain camp and a biased media on their road to defeat by Barack Obama.

She will also surprise detractors of her populist style and moose-hunting bravado by claiming she was a voracious reader in her youth who lapped up George Orwell and John Steinbeck.

Mrs Palin reveals her anguish when the pregnancy of her teenage daughter, Bristol, was played out before an international audience. But in the most glaring omission from the keenly-anticipated 413-page book, there is not a single mention of Levi Johnston, the estranged father of Bristol’s child. Mr Johnston, who has made a career out of giving interviews about the Palin family, is soon to pose for Playgirl magazine.

The memoir, for which Mrs Palin has been paid at least $1.25 million (£750,000) and possibly as much as $7 million by HarperCollins, has been at the top of US bestseller lists for weeks due to pre-orders of the 1.5 million copies already printed.

In it she claims Republican campaign managers forced her and her entourage to wear fancy, expensive clothes which she could not afford rather than the simple ones she preferred.

Mrs Palin elaborates in the book, which is to be published on Tuesday, on the significant tensions between her advisers and those of her running mate, Senator McCain.

She was particularly upset about having to pay $50,000 (£30,000) in legal bills which she says were directly related to the party’s vetting process for the vice-presidential candidacy.

According to Mrs Palin, she was told that the bills would be paid if they won the election but not if they lost.

Trevor Potter, the McCain campaign’s lawyer, yesterday rejected the charge, saying Mrs Palin was never asked to pay such legal expenses and nor did she ever reveal that her own lawyer had charged her for vetting-related work.

According to the Associated Press, which obtained a copy of her book, she writes bitterly about being stopped from delivering a concession speech on election night, of being thwarted in rewriting her statement about her daughter’s pregnancy and of how she was generally “bottled up” over what she could say to the media.

Mrs Palin says she was briefed to give non-answers in a televised debate with Senator Joe Biden, the Democrat vice-presidential contender.

She describes Katie Couric, a CBS News anchorman, as “badgering” her in a notorious interview which appeared to reveal Mrs Palin as woefully under-informed and ill-read.

Even if Couric had trouble finding out exactly what she reads nowadays, Mrs Palin says she was a voracious reader in her youth. Her favourites included Orwell’s 1984 and Steinbeck’s The Pearl.

Mrs Palin names few names in her assault although she claims Steve Schmidt, the chief McCain campaign strategist, believed she was not not doing enough preparation on policy issues and speculated that she might be suffering from post-partum depression following the birth of a son with Down’s Syndrome.

Turning to her controversial $150,000 campaign wardrobe bill, Mrs Palin says she did not appreciate the forced makeover and wonders whether she and her family were so unpresentable that such extreme measures were necessary. She says her family was told the costs were being taken care of, or were “part of the convention”.

In a pre-recorded interview with Oprah Winfrey to publicise the book, Mrs Palin insisted Levi Johnston is still part of the family. He has countered that any attempts at reconciliation are fake.